![Altaeros_Wind_Turbine_Wide[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/altaeros_wind_turbine_wide1.jpg?quality=83)
From NCAR, some wind pie in the sky.
A mother lode of wind power
Mapping the potential to harvest high-altitude wind
May 28, 2014 | What if all the energy needed by society existed just a mile or two above our heads? That’s the question raised by researchers in an emerging field known as airborne wind energy, which envisions using devices that might look like parachutes or gliders to capture electricity from the strong, steady winds that blow well above the surface in certain regions.
While logistical challenges and environmental questions remain, scientists at NCAR, the University of Delaware, and the energy firm DNV GL have begun examining where the strongest winds are and how much electricity they might be able to generate.
Their key finding: winds that blow from the surface to a height of 3,000 meters (nearly 10,000 feet) appear to offer the potential to generate more than 7.5 terawatts—more than triple the average global electricity demand of 2.4 terawatts (as of 2012, according to the study). Among the areas where such winds are strongest: the U.S. Great Plains, coastal regions along the Horn of Africa, and large stretches of the tropical oceans.
This type of research could prove critical if airborne wind energy takes off. The growing industry now includes more than 20 startups worldwide, exploring various designs for devices that could be tethered to ground stations and then raised or lowered to capture the most suitable winds at any point in time.
“From an engineering point of view, this is really complicated,” said NCAR scientist Luca Delle Monache, a co-author of a new study examining these issues. “But it could greatly increase the use of renewable energy and move the U.S. toward the goal of energy independence.”
To estimate the potential of airborne wind energy, Delle Monache, with Cristina Archer at the University of Delaware and Daran Rife at DNV GL, turned to an NCAR data set known as Climate Four Dimensional Data Assimilation. It blends computer modeling and measurements to create a retrospective analysis of the hourly, three-dimensional global atmosphere for the years 1985–2005.
The research team looked for various types of wind speed maxima, including recurring features known as low-level jets. Such jets can be ideal for energy because their speed and density is as high or higher than jets at higher elevations that would be beyond the reach of tethered wind devices. They also blow more steadily than winds captured by conventional wind turbines near the surface, potentially offering a more reliable source of energy.
Low-level jets blowing at 30-50 miles per hour or more can be found at several locations worldwide, often close to mountainous terrain or to persistent atmospheric features that help focus and channel wind. One of the strongest low-level jets on Earth flows from the Gulf of Mexico north across the Great Plains.
A study by the scientists, published last month in Renewable Energy, focused on winds in January and July. The team is now looking for additional funding to provide a more complete picture of the potential of higher-level winds. Their main goals are to estimate the strength of the winds year round and to build an interface that would enable users to explore the strength of the winds over specific regions.
“It’s important to understand the magnitude of this resource and what might be possible,” Delle Monache said.
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Several posters have already addressed the killer point here, but I will just add my two cents.
The problem is the cable or tether. There is just no way to do it, short of pie in the sky carbon nanotubes. Even then you need heavy copper to bring the power down.
The first time I saw high altitude wind proposed, I fooled around with the idea a bit and right away saw that the cable was a deal-killer. Any wind power idea must use the earth’s surface as the Newton’s 3rd Law opposite force for the collector thrust. For high altitude wind, the problem is greatly worsened because the stress on the cable must go up with the secant of the tether angle. That intrinsically means a whole LOT of tension on the cable. Either a low angle and a miles long heavy cable, or a high angle and an impossibly high stress on the shorter (but still very long) very very heavy cable.
Ain’t never gonna work. The cable will weigh too much.
Edward Richardson says:
August 14, 2014 at 3:22 pm
Thanks for the cute diagram, but I know how geothermal power works.
What you call splitting hairs, I call science, which relies upon precise definitions wherever possible. Why stop at the magma though? The ultimate sources of geothermal power are about 80% nuclear (radioactive decay) & 20% residual heat left over from the formation of the earth.
milodonharlani says:
August 14, 2014 at 3:35 pm
” I know how geothermal power works.”
..
Yes you do, as you clearly indicated in a prior post….
“The hot water might heat the rocks through which it passes, but the rocks themselves don’t need to be particularly hot”
milodonharlani says:
August 14, 2014 at 3:35 pm
“I don’t have to go to Hawaii. I’m surrounded by geothermal power & hot springs here in Oregon & where I live in Chile, although I used to live in Hawaii.”
============
You certainly are well traveled, got data ?
nickreality65 says:
August 14, 2014 at 2:50 pm
“Electricity is not the only energy form there is and it doesn’t meet the needs of diverse applications. Moving it around is a problem. Electricity won’t move us & our stuff across great the distances that have to be traveled. ”
Well it did for my weekly commute of 350 km (220 miles) a year ago. I used a thing called a train. We have them here in Germany. Pretty fast as well.
Electric “cars” will become rather interesting once they don’t have to carry their electricity around with them in a big heavy bucket.
Does anyone know – just offhand – what a 10KW (for instance) generator/gear-set/control system weighs?
I would be interested in the kinetic energy calculation (in TNT – approx 4.7 megajoules per kilogram) for one of these falling at terminal velocity.
Hmm. A mile or more of cable capable of taking 11kVa (the transmission voltage of ‘bulk’ electricity) is going to weigh what? And how muich energy is it going to take any sort of platform to keep that mile-long weight up in the air?
And when the wind blows, or a storm comes through?
This is only pie in the sky!
u.k.(us) says:
August 14, 2014 at 3:47 pm
If my opinions of various hot springs around & in the Pacific Ocean counts, then, yes, I have untabulated ratings “data”.
As for energetic & economic data on geothermal power, no. Sorry.
This might be of interest:
http://www.oregon.gov/energy/renew/geothermal/pages/geo_index.aspx
milodonharlani says:
August 14, 2014 at 4:17 pm
=========
Am I conversing with a bot ????
one of those cable breaking up top will whip you good when it lands.
also need to deal with grounding them and doing corrosion prevention to prevent static charges.
Never mind the feasibility – feel the subsidies!
For those pondering the effect on the winds with energy being removed, I would expect the effect would be to slow the winds so the Coriolis force would have less effect. Therefore, the winds would tend to blow in a more poleward direction. This could have a significant effect on climate to the East and poleward side of the turbines. But as the idea is infeasible for so many reasons (severe turbulence, icing, hail to name a few), changes in climate are not something to worry about.
u.k.(us) says:
August 14, 2014 at 4:23 pm
No.
So; we send up hundreds of big-ass balloons attached to 2mi+ copper cables to make a Faraday cage the size of Texas. Superb lightning rods. Twister season weaves them into baskets. Years in the making, then the jet stream moves. My hairs hurt.
It’s the criminally stupid ideas of these self appointed
rulers/ would be messiahs of mankind that people need to be protected
from!
“””””…..milodonharlani says:
August 14, 2014 at 12:51 pm
george e. smith says:
August 14, 2014 at 12:37 pm
Can’t say if magnetic containment will prove a better approach than lasers or some other system, but there are lots of small scale tokamaks operating all over the world now. Maybe the engineering problems are not solvable, but IMO they’re less of a waste of money than the Green Energy scams……”””””
Well we know that thermonuclear fusion works; it’s called an H-Bomb.
Well it’s more likely it’s a D-T reaction as that has the lowest ignition condition, with a Lawson criterion of 5E19 s.m^-3 (seconds per cubic meter).
But now you have to make Tritium, in a fission reactor. So why not just build fission reactors. There’s NO Tritium in SF Bay, but plenty of Deuterium.
So you better plan on the D-D reaction; not the D-T.
D-D has a Lawson criterion of 1E21 s.m^-3 , 20 times the D-T ignition condition, and the D-T gives you 17.60 MeV per fusion, versus only 4.04 MeV for D-D, if you get T, or 4.04 MeV if you get 3He plus a neutron (helium 3)..
I don’t know how you select the reaction products, or what mix you get if you can’t select, but both reactions only produce garbage, and the neutrons mean material deterioration.
But Laser implosion is just an H-bomb, in miniature. you use a laser to squish the fuel, instead of a fission A-Bomb., and your fuel capsule is vaporized, in the process, so you have to go and buy a new one for each hammer whack; it’s a whack-a-mole Rube Goldberg machine.
If the laser(s) all operate in sync, it crushes, instead of bursting out one side.
So it isn’t stable, controlled fusion. It’s quite uncontrollable in fact. That is “Inertial” confinement.
Tokamaks use pulsed magnetic fields. So they are dynamic systems. Earnshaw’s theorem says there is NO stable electric or magnetic field squisher possible, since the EM force blows, instead of sucks, so once again you don’t have a continuous stable process, including removing the reaction products (garbage) and inserting new fuel.
If you supplied those fields all the time for a continuous reaction, the field coils would evaporate from se;f heating.
So I wouldn’t invest one brass razoo in any of these schemes.
The tether balloon is at least as practical as fusion.
A typical 1.5MW GE wind turbine nacelle and rotor blade assembly weighs 92 tons (excluding the tower). Suspend that!
That mysterious hot water, which came first the water or the rock, brings with it lots of nasty challenges, hydrogen sulfide, arsenic. Check the utility’s experience at the Geysers geothermal power plants in California. Ask New Zealand about subsidence caused by pulling lots of hot rock/water out of the formations. All kinds of answers, all kinds of solutions, but what, exactly, is the problem?
Time for some SERIOUS drug testing at NCAR……
The CAGW rent seekers are insane….
E=MC^2 is 1,000,000 times stronger than F=1/2MV^2….
The US just needs to spend about $60 billion/yr for 30 years building LFTRs and the US could be 100% energy independent burning thorium; just 0.4%/yr of GDP.
Pie-in-the-sky SCI-Fi scams like wind farms tethered 1 mile up in the air are just fodder for useful idiots to give them BS talking points during energy committee meetings and excuses to waste more taxpayer money on completely insane and impractical projects.
It is disgusting that taxpayers foot the bill for this nonsense.
Sweet Old Bob says:
August 14, 2014 at 5:17 pm
Long past time to abolish NCAR & GISS to help reduce the trillion invented & borrowed dollar deficit of the US four trillion dollar federal budget.
Flydlbee says: “This would be vehemently opposed by most of the aviation community; the cable connecting these devices to the ground would be lethal to aircraft.”
(Mac the Knife, Eugene say similar.)
Aha, kapitalist despoilers of the planet, you mistake this for a bug! But is not. Is a feature.
/s
Extracting energy from jet streams is a rather old concept.
It probably ranks on a par or maybe somewhat worse than the solar panel and wind industries in that the amount of energy that has to be put in to design, build, launch, control, repair and maintain the system along with power losses and power withdrawn from the grid in times such as when the jet stream turbines are maneuvering or are down for repairs and maintenance, the power required to cover all these factors could be arguably greater than the entire generated output of power of the entire system throughout it’s entire economical life time.
[ About 13 % average but varies between about 9% to 16% of their total output is withdrawn back from the grid for wind turbines for them to keep operating when they are not generating [ enough ] power themselves which is about 20 or 30% of the time ]
In fact the whole system would probably not even generate enough power to meet it’s running and overall maintenance costs as those energy costs would be so high just to maintain, run and service the entire system of jet stream turbines. Plus ground to air power transmitting and anchoring cabling. Plus massive mobile ground handling winches for the cabling. Plus power grids that have to cover the whole country so as the turbines are moved around to keep within the constantly changing tracks of the jet streams, the turbines can be connected to the nearest grid in a couple of hours and so on, all reliant on completely inaccessible, a couple of tens of kilometres up, airborne, immense in size, highly technical and sophisticated but fragile, to keep the weight down, turbines, all at the end of some very long, constantly in unpredictable motion, cabling systems that are live with a few tens of kilovolts running through it.
There may not even be enough power left over after the entire system has taken it’s power requirements for use by the groundlings far below.
And of course, like solar and wind turbines it would never replace ground base load generators but just be totally useless and completely unnecessary, an extreme economical extravagance , an additional parasitic add on which would again, like solar and wind power now, would need and demand the base load power generating capability be always there that would be able to generate the entire needs of our civilisation when solar and wind are not generating any useable or enough power.
Add the further total unpredictability and utter complication of the jet stream turbines if they were ever even possible to build, into that mix and the whole idea aligns with stupid is as stupid does, an impressive characteristic of just about every would be climate science whacko and their attempts to “stop global warming”.
;
A modicum of thought applied to this whole idea would have seen it’s immediate rejection.
But, sadly, “a modicum of thought” is a quite foreign concept to most of these climate science whackos who like to assume the title of “scientists”, to real science’s great detriment, and who promote these particular brands of straight out lunacy
Luckily, whoever thinks these flying windmills are a good idea will need engineers to build and operate them, and these engineers will stop the government from wasting our money because they’ll be laughing.